2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This study presents findings from an innovative undergraduate internship and research opportunity at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, funded by a grant from the Department of Education. The novelty of this initiative is to involve students from minority-serving institutions in meaningful research and internship experiences, thereby fostering their academic and professional growth. The participant in this program comes from an underrepresented minority background in STEM, gaining valuable practical experience in aerospace and mechanical engineering through this internship.

At Marshall Space Flight Center, the ET30 division conducts structural strength testing on articles to find various components and evaluate how they withstand extreme forces that the customer will need to know. This is executed by applying and reacting to extreme loads using compression, tension, and torsion. Many environmental properties (temperature, pressure, and humidity) can be tested by environmental simulations, which are critical in assessing the durability of the components in actual space conditions.

The objective was to gather vital data for customers like the United Launch Alliance (ULA). One of the major projects worked on involves ULA’s Vulcan Rocket, for which ET30 tested components of the Centaur V upper stage. The instrumentation on Centaur V is essential to measuring stress, strain, and other mechanical factors during testing to ensure the system can perform as expected during a launch. Most of the testing done follows a general testing process. This process consists of designing, fabricating, instrumenting, creating a test setup, constructing the database, writing a Test Procedure Sheet, and running the actual test. A specific test was a dog bone test, which was designed to focus stress on the middle portion of the sample. This “dog bone” test used methods that correlate directly with larger-scale structural tests, such as those conducted on Centaur V. These smaller tests serve as a cost-effective and reliable method for verifying behavior before committing to large tests on systems like those in Centaur V. Through processes like the ones used in ET30, these systems are ensured to meet flight readiness for demanding conditions of space exploration.